By Healthcare Facilities Today

Healthcare Design magazine's "Take Five" series asks healthcare design professionals about what’s got their attention. The magazine recently talked to Robin Guenther, a principal with Perkins+Will. Guenther counted down her top five ideas that will influence healthcare in 2014, ranked in order of growing importance.

5. Resilience

Whether you recall the hospital closures associated with Superstorm Sandy there’s no mistaking that improving the resilience of healthcare infrastructure is top of mind.

Resilience means incorporating essential redundancy into the everyday infrastructure of hospitals, such as operable windows, daylighting, on-site renewable energy, and cogeneration systems. Hopefully, we’ll stop relegating emergency systems to minimal, normally extraneous capital investments.

4. Community engagement

Across the U.S., hospitals and healthcare systems are increasingly joining the growing anchor institution movement and investing in their local community’s social, economic, and ecological future. 

3. Transparency on two fronts

The emergence of big data made possible by increased digitizing of medical information (the EMR) is transforming healthcare delivery. The ability to harvest real information about outcomes and relative performance of hospitals—and make that data available to consumers—will continue to drive healthcare delivery improvement. 

There’s also a revolution in building product composition disclosure, driven by emerging science on the impact of chemical exposures on health and leading healthcare organizations’ response to that science.

2. Healthy buildings

The entire building industry is learning that creating conditions for health is indeed a design problem and that built environments matter. 

1. Health care, not disease care

This trend toward reshaping healthcare to focus on the upstream causes of health and disease promises to revolutionize care delivery and the built environments that support it. 

Read the article.